“Hey, guys, look at me! I’m a specking Marine.” The man who said this had a low voice that sounded utterly without intelligence.
The buildings in this area, mostly two- and three-story commercial structures with block-length display windows and awning-covered entrances, had been looted and gutted. The glass in the display windows was shattered. In one window, dozens of naked mannequins lay piled on top of each other like logs in a fireplace.
The building directly behind me was a looted diner. The people who broke into the restaurant seemed to have had a certain reverence for it. They did not break the windows or steal the tables and chairs. Except for a missing door, the restaurant looked clean enough to open for business.
Whoever was talking was right around the corner from me when he said, “Careful with that, it’s worth something.”
“This thing? I wouldn’t want to wear it. It’s got clone meat inside it. Clone probably rotted all over it.”
“I’m telling you, that helmet is worth something. That Marine combat armor, that’s good shit.”
“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it,” a third voice said. “I’ll give you five hundred bucks for it.”
I did not recognize the voices. I knelt in a shadow to listen for clues about who these men were.
“Money doesn’t buy jack,” the first man complained.
“Might sometime.”
“Only if the government comes back. If that happens, we’re all screwed.” That was the second speaker, the only one who sounded like he could read.
“I’ll trade you a canned ham for it,” the third man offered.
“A canned ham? No shit?” the man sounded impressed.
Staying low to the ground, I slipped over towards a broken display window. The floor inside the display was covered with sparkling shards of glass. Whatever had been on display inside this window must have been valuable since the looters had picked it clean.
I climbed into the window and found an open door that led into the store itself. This particular shop had sold gourmet foods, not that there was anything left on the shelves. Posters showing kosher this and imported that covered the walls. Banners for cheeses and special brands of coffee hung from the ceiling. Toppled refrigerator display cases, demolished shelves, and cast-away shopping carts littered the floor. The store was huge and dark except for the bright sunlight that shined in through small windows in distinct rays.
I sorted my way through the wreckage. Checkout stands were pushed over and computerized registers lay on the floor, their drawers hanging open and empty. Stepping over a register, I approached the front door of the store and peered around the edge.
The plaza did not look busy by any stretch of the imagination, but it was well-trafficked. It looked like a downtown shopping district might look on a Saturday afternoon, in a city that closed on weekends. Groups of men and women sat on walls or around a fountain. The fountain was full of sloshing blue water, but its jets were turned off.
I recognized the canned ham boys instantly. They were the ones standing around the corpse of a Marine. The biggest of the men had stripped the helmet off of the dead clone and held it in his hands. As I watched, he placed one boot on the dead man’s back. I decided the man was an idiot as I watched him hold the helmet to his face and stare into the visor. “What’s so good about this thing?”
I could have used that visor. In my personal opinion, Marine combat armor, with its audio sensors and lenses, was the most important innovation in soldiering since the invention of gunpowder. Also, I did not like seeing these grave robbers abusing the body of a fallen Marine.
Looking around the plaza, I noted that all of the men were armed. Most had government-issue M27s. They must have taken these from dead soldiers and Marines. I wondered if looters had found their way to Fort Washington and how thoroughly they had picked over the base.
“Why do you want this so badly?” the goliath with the helmet asked the runt sitting beside him.
“No reason, I just like the look of it.”
“You wouldn’t have offered a ham for it for no reason.”
At the edge of the plaza, three men looked under the hood of an Army supply truck. The truck’s dark green paint stood out against the cement courtyard and slate fountain. Any number of warlords had probably carved up the city and claimed sections for themselves. I had located some warlord’s stronghold. There were a couple of heavy-caliber machine guns mounted on the front and back of the truck, but if that was the best this dime store daimyo could do, he and his tribe would not last long.
“Throw in some chocolate bars and you can have it,” the big man said.
“I ate all my chocolate bars,” the runt sounded embarrassed. “How about a half-box of Twinkies?”
I went back into the store and let myself out through a window on the other side.
The warlords with downtown territories mostly concerned themselves with survival. They held small areas, kept their gangs grouped in tight clusters, and gathered whatever small arms they could find. I passed more than one dozen similarly doomed fiefdoms on my way through Safe Harbor.
What if every city in the galaxy had degenerated this way? Had Washington, D.C. been carved up by a handful of self-appointed warlords? Maybe not. Maybe cities like Safe Harbor, cities that had been evacuated, collapsed more readily into anarchy. Cities that still had soldiers and police to keep the peace might be okay. It occurred to me that this anarchy was probably not restricted to U.A. territory, either. The Confederate Arms probably had the same problem.
As I reached the outer suburbs around Fort Washington, however, I discovered signs of a different disorder. Someone had claimed these streets, and I had a pretty good idea of who had done it. Someone painted the letters JC on signs and walls. Like a dog urinating to mark its territory, JC, possibly Jimmy Callahan, had painted graffiti around this part of town. On one larger building I saw, “JC ‘Resurrection’.”
“Resurrected,” I thought, it had to be Callahan.
I thought about Silent Tommy and Limping Eddie, the two men who had been his bodyguards. Were they his seconds-in-command? The notion of Jimmy Callahan running this section of town should have made me laugh. Instead, it sent a chill through me.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The ruins of Fort Washington blended in with the stores, churches, and houses in this ugly suburb. I found my way into a neighborhood that could only have been officer housing. The houses were three-bedroom jobs that all looked alike from the outside, right down to the flower beds and white picket fences. These homes had no more floor space than a two-bedroom apartment. They had patios the size of postage stamps and shingled roofs. Looking up the drive-ways, I saw upended tricycles and plastic swimming pools. I could almost hear the children playing.
Not wanting to approach the fort in daylight, I broke into one of these homes and hid inside it until nightfall. The front door of the house had been marked with a red JC, but the contents inside had not yet been picked over. I entered a clean kitchen that was orderly except for the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Inside the pantry I found a jar of peanut butter that I ate by the spoonful as I waited for sunset.
The officer who had lived in this home was a family man with a pretty platinum-blond wife and two little boys. I saw pictures of the family on the walls. The boys shared a single room sleeping on bunk beds with steel tube frames. Searching the house, I found a flashlight and a cheap pair of binoculars, both of which I took. I also found a book of fairy tales and a Bible, both of which I left behind. The wife had jars of fruit preserves in the garage. She and the boys had undoubtedly left the planet during the mass evacuation. Even if he was alive, her husband would never find them again. Not without the Broadcast Network.
Before leaving the house, I stowed my M27 and four grenades in the family linen closet under a stack of children’s blankets. I would need to travel light and kill quietly. I kept my particle beam pistol and the ridiculously large combat knife.
A
s the sun dropped on the horizon and the sky turned dark blue, I slipped back on to the street and traveled the last mile to Fort Washington. A tabby cat followed me from a distance as I walked down the street. The people had left their pets behind. The cats would roam free. Dogs left in houses would likely starve to death.
Fort Washington was a large compound encompassed by a chain link fence and razor wire. No lights burned anywhere that I could see, but I saw the glow of fires around the grounds. Lasers or looters had destroyed much of the fence. Making one last inventory check, I knelt beside the chassis of an overturned bus, examined my pistol to be sure it was charged, and stole on to the base.
Since the attack on Earth, I had developed an inconvenient appreciation for human life. It was as if my neural programming had gone haywire. I had the same instincts as ever, but after seeing the Galactic Republic go up in flame, I now placed a value on humanity. I even had an idea about what was going wrong inside me. I was designed and programmed to protect the Unified Authority. My programming must have been specifically set up to do whatever was necessary for the protection of the Republic. Only now, there was no Republic. I had no trouble identifying the enemy, but the mental loop that let me justify any action had been closed.
The attack had left the base in ruins. Every building I passed was destroyed. The first building I saw was a barracks, an elongated brick dormitory for enlisted Marines. The building had caved in.
More than anything else, Fort Washington reminded me of a college campus. It had old buildings and new ones, modern structures made out of the same red brick that the minutemen would have used had they built barracks during the Revolutionary War. Tradition. A network of tree-lined lanes laced the base together. Between the buildings were long, well-mowed stretches of grass that looked like city parks in miniature.
The base landscaping also included trees. There were thirty-foot firs and groups of leafed trees. As I walked around the base, I noticed large bundles hanging from the lower boughs of almost every tree. The bundles looked like rucksacks. They hung at the end of long leads of rope, dangling perfectly still, apparently so heavy that the low summer breeze did not move them.
Strange how the mind works. Coming into the base I did not notice these cocoons. Now that I saw a few, the mental veil dissolved from my eyes and I saw that they were everywhere, hanging from the trees, from the rafters of the buildings, and two or three bundles hung from each streetlamp.
They were not rucksacks, of course. These were the Marines of Fort Washington. Pulling my flashlight from my pocket, I stole up to one of the streetlights. Three men dangled above me, two clones and an officer. The clones were clearly killed in combat. They had been stripped of their armor, but I could tell by the blistered skin of their faces and their charred bodysuits that they were killed by laser fire. Some grave robber must have found them while scavenging through the base.
The officer, however, had not died during the raid. Someone had executed him, firing a single bullet into the side of his head from close range. I could see his tied hands through the bag. Shining my light on him, I saw that the top right corner of his head was a bloody, hollow mess.
These were Callahan’s scarecrows. Killed in action or put to death after the battle, it didn’t matter. Jimmy Callahan strung up the bodies as a warning to other warlords that Fort Washington was his territory. If I looked around long enough, I might find Colonel Bernie Phillips hanging from a tree. As the base commander, Phillips had helped me stash Callahan. He was the one who helped me steal an Army jeep so that I could sneak into Fort Clinton. I was disgusted with myself for letting this desecration bother me.
There might have been 20,000 or even 30,000 men assigned to Fort Washington. Could Callahan and his men have strung up all of the bodies? Some of the Marines would have gone into town to fight. Seeing the hopelessness of the situation, some of the officers would have gone AWOL. The enlisted clones would have fought to the end.
I thought that many of the men killed during the attack would have been too torn up to hang, but that turned out to be wrong. Under a nearby tree, I saw a body without arms or legs or any of the familiar curves you associate with the human form. On closer inspection I discovered that it was nothing but a bunch of body parts. Somebody had stuffed this fellow into nylon netting used for laundry.
Like I said before, most of the base lay in darkness. Crossing a hill, however, I heard the mechanical drone of a power generator. I had no trouble locating where the noise came from. Off in the distance, a two-story building shown in a bath of incandescent light. Glare from that building illuminated the broken buildings around it.
You could only describe Jimmy Callahan as a complete moron. Lying on the ground at the crest of a grassy hill, partially hidden by the six Corps corpses hanging above me, I could have picked off half of Callahan’s army with a single shot had I brought a rocket launcher. They had lined up in a tight group for some kind of parade.
The terrain he selected showed his lack of tactical training. He set up his headquarters in a building surrounded by hills. The hills formed a ring around him, giving me or any invading gang the high-ground advantage.
And then there was the light. Callahan felt compelled to show off to the world that he had a working power generator. The light from his headquarters illuminated his troops. I could see the men in the machine-gun nests set up on the veranda. I had a much better view of the sharpshooters on the roof than they had of me. Although they had night-for-day scopes, they would need to locate me before they could aim and shoot. I could see them clear as day.
A particle beam pistol, however, was not the right equipment for a sniper attack. It was a short-range weapon for killing people and blowing up targets within a thirty-feet radius.
So I lay silently at the base of a tree, hidden from view by dangling corpses, and I watched. Most of Callahan’s men wore fatigues. Some carried M27s. Some carried pistols.
I estimated Callahan’s troops at somewhere between 150 and 200 men. He had jeeps and all-terrain vehicles, and a few armored personnel carriers. How he had taken control of this territory with so few men I could not understand. Then I heard the rumble. An LG tank rumbled up the street toward the lighted building. The letters, LG, stood for low gravity. These units were made for use on planets with low gravity, obviously. Tell a Marine engineer to make a tank heavier and you can guess exactly what he’ll do. He adds thicker armor, heavier guns, more durable treads, and more powerful motors. Most tanks weighed about sixty-five tons or 130,000 pounds. The extra 70,000 pounds on an LG tank was dedicated to killing.
That was how Callahan became so powerful. Who or what could possibly stand up to that tank? All of the jets on Bolivar Air Base would surely have been destroyed, not that a jet could necessarily destroy a tank like this. Whoever took over Fort Clinton Army base might have similar tanks.
I pulled out the binoculars and took a closer look at the situation. These were cheap “bird watcher” quality gear, but they gave me a better view. I could read the markings on the tank as it rolled to within a few feet of that lighted building. I was just lowering the binoculars when an officer stepped out of the building. For an odd moment I thought it might be Colonel Phillips. I brought up the binoculars again.
Jimmy Callahan, wearing one of Bernie Phillips’s colonel uniforms, strutted down the stairs like a made man who owns the future. His arms swinging at his sides and his head held high, he surveyed his troops. He barked orders and strutted around the tank pretending to inspect it. I did not even need these lousy peeps to see the self-satisfied expression on Callahan’s face.
“See any reason why I shouldn’t cap him?” The voice was so low it sounded like a whisper. Ray Freeman knelt beside me. He held a sniper’s rifle in one hand and a rocket launcher in the other.
I pretended to have known he was there all along. “I don’t see the point in it,” I said.
“Looks like we’re going to be stuck on this planet for a long time, Harris,” Freeman s
aid. “And I don’t want Callahan for president.”
He raised the rifle and sighted Callahan. It was a top grade rifle with a built-in silencer. No one more than twenty feet away would hear shots from that gun. Because of our elevated location, no one would spot us.
“So you’re bringing democracy to New Columbia,” I commented.
Freeman, who was about as likely to appreciate ironic humor as he was to learn ballet, merely grunted.
“What about the tank?” I asked.
“You worried about it?” he asked.
“Not especially,” I said. I wasn’t. I was more worried about the jeeps. In this gravity, the tank would rumble along so slowly that a five-year-old could outrun it.
“I didn’t think so.”
“But I’m not worried about Callahan, either,” I said, taking a quick glance at him through the binoculars. I was about to tell Freeman that I had a self-broadcasting ship.
“Me, either,” Freeman interrupted. And with that he pulled the trigger. Two hundred yards below us, a misty red halo formed around Callahan’s head, and he dropped to the ground. While the people below shouted in confusion and scattered, Freeman picked off the four sharpshooters on the top of the building. Let me rephrase that—he picked off the three snipers I had seen, plus the one that I had not noticed.
Two of Callahan’s soldiers ran for a jeep. Freeman picked off the faster man before he reached the vehicle. He shot the second man as he tried to climb into the driver’s seat.
Total chaos broke out below. The men in the machine-gun nests fired into the hills. Only one of the guns fired even near our direction. Freeman shot that gunner first, and then he took out the gunners in the other nests.
“You here to watch or help?” Freeman asked.
“You have things under control,” I said as I picked up the rocket launcher and aimed at the tank. Thinking this rocket would destroy that tank was the only miscalculation Freeman made. A shoulder-mounted rocket like this might damage that LG, but it sure as hell would not stop it.
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